What is the proper procedure for creating vPort when MPIO is desired?

[Landrew09]

Hello everyone.

I'm a newbie to SAN virtualization and have a newbie type question. Given that I already have the Qlogic guide "Fibre Channel HBA and VM Migration" (found here http://filedownloads.qlogic.com/files/Manual/69173/FC0054605-00A.pdf) AND that I have experience with FC HBAs and fabric zoning and am possibly transferring this perspective to SAN virtualization tasks.

Here's my question. When creating a vPort the Qlogic guide only mentions creating a single vPort, I'm used to zoning both ports on a physical HBA to provide multipath support. Is this not the case with vPorts? The guide makes no mention of creating vPorts for each physical port on a dual port HBA so I don't see how the multipathing function is provided to virtual machines. Can anyone elaborate on this issue? If I were to simply follow this guide as it is written I don't see how VMs would have any multipath support and would not be protected from an outage on one of our two fabrics.

Am I over thinking this?

Thanks for any suggestions

[Ivan Lyanguzov · Accepted solution]

Landrew09,

It seems you are right. When only one vPort going through physical port is connected to VM, no multipath exists. You need to create a second vPort on another physical port and then connect it to the same VM. Multipath should be configured inside VM.

Ivan.

[Landrew09]

Ivan,

Thanks for the response. Out of curiosity, do you work with virtualization and have you also experienced this same issue? I find it odd that I have found no other discussion of this issue either on Qlogic or HP forums. Given the increasing focus on virtualization these days and that many of us have multi-path in place, I would have thought that this would have been more of a hot topic.

Thanks

Andrew

[Ivan Lyanguzov]

Andrew,

I work in HP support, so for me it is just another issue that needs to be resolved. As VM is using virtualized hardware, there probably should be the same kind of requirements for multipathing as for physical server.

Ivan.

[Landrew09]

Ivan,

OK, this works for me.

Thanks again for your input.

Andrew